Application Areas

No matter whether you are performing rapid control prototyping or hardware-in-the-loop simulation: Real-Time Interface (RTI) is the link between dSPACE hardware and the development software MATLAB/Simulink/Stateflow from MathWorks®.

Working with RTI

To connect your model to a dSPACE I/O board, just drag the I/O module from the RTI block library onto your model and then connect it to the Simulink blocks. All settings, such as parameterization, are available by clicking the appropriate blocks. Simulink Coder™ (formerly Real-Time Workshop®) generates the model code while RTI provides blocks that implement the I/O capabilities of dSPACE systems in your Simulink models, thus preparing the model for the real-time application. Your real-time model is compiled, downloaded, and started automatically on your real-time hardware, without you having to write a single line of code. RTI guides you through the configuration. RTI provides consistency checks, so potential errors can be identified and corrected before or during the build process.

Comprehensive Functionalities

RTI handles any kind of continuous-time, discrete-time, and multirate system. Depending on the I/O hardware, different channels of the same I/O board can be used with different sample rates, and even in different subsystems. RTI supports asynchronous events and lets you set task priorities and task overrun strategies for executing the interrupt-driven subsystems. It also supports time-triggered tasks and timetables, which let you implement tasks and groups of tasks with variable or predefined delay times in relation to an associated trigger event. This makes task handling in your model very flexible. In addition, RTI offers checks that help avoid double or improper use of channels.

Simulink and Stateflow models on the real-time hardware. The implementation time is greatly reduced. The hardware configuration for the real-time application is guided by automatic consistency checks to prevent parameterization errors. For maximum flexibility, each RTI version supports several different MATLAB releases (see www.dspace.com/go/Compatibility). Models from most previous MATLAB and RTI releases are migrated automatically when newer versions of RTI are used.